Baines: Disbarred lawyer rises from the gutter and receives redemption

This week, the Law Society of B.C. released a decision on an application by Michael Grant Gayman to be reinstated as a lawyer.

Thirteen years earlier, the Law Society of B.C. had disbarred him after he committed a serious breach of trust. Already an alcoholic, he drowned himself in booze, lost his wife and children, went bankrupt, and literally fell into the gutter.

Last year, Gayman applied for reinstatement. The hearing panel, headed by David Mossop, released its decision this week.

“This is more than a credentials hearing,” it begins. “It is the story of a human journey.”

As outlined in the decision, Gayman was born in Vancouver and adopted by a prominent Vancouver pediatrician, Dr. George Gayman, and his wife, a former school teacher.

He grew up in the Dunbar area and did well in school. He was elected to the school council and was an excellent rugby player. When he graduated from high school, he was on the honour roll.

There were, however, signs his life was turning in the wrong direction.

He began drinking and using marijuana. He dropped out of his second year at the University of B.C. He worked at logging camps and the Boathouse restaurant in Richmond, where he made good money and had access to “an unlimited supply of free liquor.”

At the Boathouse, he met his future wife. In 1974, they got married. He was 23. Two years later they had a child. Gayman went back to UBC, obtained his BA and eventually graduated from law school.

He articled with a well-regarded downtown law firm and was called to the bar on May 12, 1980. He became a partner in a small, but successful firm, specializing in employment law. (His clients included Pharmasave and Pacific Press, publisher of The Vancouver Sun and Province.)

As a lawyer, he found more opportunities to consume alcohol. Every day, he drank up to 26 ounces of hard liquor.

Four years into his law career, a high school friend introduced him to “SP,” who had set up a trust to take advantage of Scientific Research Tax Credits. Although this area of law was outside Gayman’s expertise, he agreed to act as trustee.

The trust agreement required Gayman to hold about $1 million that about 20 different investors had paid for the prospective tax credits, and not to release the funds except under certain terms and conditions.

However, immediately after Gayman was appointed trustee, SP approached him to disburse $350,000. The appropriate documentation was not in place, but SP persuaded him it was forthcoming, so he agreed.

Shortly thereafter, SP told Gayman he had lost the money on unauthorized expenditures, either in the stock market or other investments. He asked Gayman to release the rest of the money.

Gayman said he panicked and advanced the money in the hope that all the funds could be restored. However, SP and the accountant involved in the trust agreement fled the jurisdiction. “It seems they were in cahoots, and the scheme was fraudulent in nature,” the hearing tribunal said.

Gayman described his state of mind at the time: “I’m realizing that I’ve made a horrendous mistake ... I saw everything I had crashing down. … I lost it. I was beside myself and drinking insanely.”

At that point, the hearing panel noted, “Three forces began to come down upon Mr. Gayman. They were the investors, the law society and his dependency on alcohol.”

The investors obtained judgment against him and the law society cited him for breach of trust. On May 6, 1999, he was disbarred. As the panel noted, disbarment is the law society’s equivalent of capital punishment

His drinking intensified. He found work as a dispatcher for a furnace service company. To satisfy his craving for alcohol, he scavenged empty bottles. He also picked up cigarette butts from the street.

In 2002, his mother died. He tried to stop drinking, but then his father died and he started drinking heavily again.

“What I didn’t understand was that I was powerless over alcohol,” he told the hearing tribunal. “I kept thinking I could handle it. ... and that was my insanity. I kept doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”

By this time, his first marriage had disintegrated. In March 2003, he moved to Fort McMurray with his new wife to make a fresh start. He got a job at Walmart stocking shelves during the night shift at $12 per hour. However, his drinking continued and his second wife soon left him.

“I have a memory that I hope I never lose which is my last night in Fort McMurray,” Gayman told the panel. “I had way too much to drink. I was crawling along the sidewalk, which was covered in frozen slush and I was pushing my briefcase ahead of me because it was too heavy to carry. And, you know, it was symbolically the last vestige of my legal career. So, as I say, I don’t want to lose that memory because I don’t want to go back there.”

In April 2003, Gayman returned to Vancouver. He found himself one night sitting in his sister’s kitchen, drinking wine: “I basically broke down and said to her, ‘Take me to a psych ward. Take me to detox. I just want the pain to go away.”

The UBC psychiatric ward was full, so he stayed in the emergency department for a few days until they found him at a bed at the Harbour Light detox centre. At that point, the panel said, “his life changed from one of despair to one of hope.”

He enrolled in a 12-step rehab program. He started on a food line, where he helped prepare 10 meals a week and served about 400 people a week. He was permitted to stay in residence, as long as he was looking for work.

He recalled a pivotal point in his recovery, when he was applying for a job as a human resources officer at the Surrey school board.

“I’m not saying they would have given me the job, but in the middle of the interview I realized I didn’t want it, and what I wanted to do is work at Harbour Light, even if it was working on the front desk as a desk attendant. I wanted to be a piece in the puzzle that made up the big picture of the services that they provide.”

“Fortunately,” the panel noted, “the Salvation Army saw great potential in Mr. Gayman.” It offered him a job as assistant manager of their corrections program.

In March 2005, he was promoted to manager of emergency shelters. He became an extreme weather response coordinator for the Vancouver area. (In this capacity, he was quoted on numerous occasions by The Sun and other media outlets.)

In 2007, he took on additional responsibility as a worker in the human resources department of the Salvation Army. Finally, in July 2010, the Salvation Army asked him to become director of labour relations. In this position, he is responsible for 180 people.

“Mr. Gayman has come a long way in his life journey,” the panel noted. “At a low point, he was crawling, drunk, in the slush in Fort McMurray dragging his briefcase. Now, he is in a senior management position with one of the most prominent NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Canada.”

Gayman began reconnecting with the legal profession. He joined the accountability group of the Lawyers Assistance Program, which helps lawyers who are dealing with substance abuse. “The group welcomed Mr. Gayman with open arms,” the panel said.

He later became a director of the Western Recovery Foundation and the Turning Point Society, which own and operate, respectively, recovery houses for alcoholics and drug addicts.

He also reunited with his children, which he described as the greatest “gift” of his recovery:

“You know, I – I lost everything I had, and I regained a good portion of it. And then I lost all of that again. And, you know, I – my children had, in essence, written me off once. And I regained their love and affection. And then I lost that again. So to have it now is precious.”

The panel asked why he wanted to be reinstated as a lawyer:

“It’s two-fold. Firstly, it’s the last step in a process where I can hopefully achieve closure of what is obviously the most significant event in my life, and, hopefully, finally forgive myself for that. The other aspect is to come here to the law society and say I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the time and trouble I caused everybody. And I’m sorry for the disrepute that I brought upon the legal profession in the process. I didn’t see it then. I see it now.”

The panel concluded that Gayman had shown “a high degree of impeccable behaviour” and “sufficient time had elapsed to demonstrate his character and fitness to practise law.”

But there was a potential sticking point that the panel had to consider: Sometimes it’s necessary to refuse a person readmission to preserve the public’s confidence in the legal profession. “In other words,” the panel said, “the individual sometimes has to be sacrificed.”

In this case, however, the panel concluded “the public would not have confidence in the legal profession if we did not give this individual a second chance … The evidence is overwhelming that his character was changed and that there is little or no chance he will repeat the same or similar mistake.”

The panel emphasized that this is “an exceptional case that should not be used by disbarred lawyers to gain reinstatement. There are few Mr. Gaymans.”

It took 13 years, but Gayman’s journey finally brought him back to the place where his career had ended. This time, however, his executioner became his redeemer.

dbaines@vancouversun.com

Blog: vancouversun.com/baines

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Baines: Disbarred lawyer rises from the gutter and receives redemption

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